Monday, March 25, 2013

Campaign Thoughts on Pathfinder Barrowmaze

The last session of my Pathfinder Barrowmaze campaign saw the death of one of the PC's, Boyd the barbarian. We must have spent a good hour of game time with the players discussing whether or not they could afford a Raise Dead spell. The player debated whether to make a new character or not, but decided on seeing if they could Raise his character. Making a new character would put him at least a level behind the others and he did not want to lose ground on all the XP he had gained on his just slain character.

The consequences of Raise Dead (according to Pathfinder rules) meant the player's character would have 2 permanent negative levels after being raised. The player did not want to be brought back to life and play a gimped character, so the cost of 2 Restoration spells needed to be added. This amounted to around 10,000 gold pieces. And this entire process mechanically would take 2 weeks of game time.

So yes, having a character die sucks. But I think I missed a role-playing opportunity of what instead boiled down to a mechanics discussion. We never determined which temple they went to to get Boyd raised. There was no role-play between any priest and the characters to determine the cost of the raise dead. We just went through the mechanical motions of the rules to solve a situation without role-playing it. This has been bothering the heck out of me.

The only comfort I have is that the whole process has cost the party nearly all their gold and they even had to sell a few magic items to make up the difference. So, they have a motivation to adventure some more.

I haven't run a group through a true megadungeon before and I always wanted to. Barrowmaze fits the bill, but there really hasn't been much room for role-playing with NPCs and there is no real plot at the moment. I've been wanting to transition the group to the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, and I think now is the perfect time to do so while they are in a 2 week downtime.